The devastating environmental impact of human progress like you've never seen it before

In the past two decades, one-tenth of the world’s global wilderness – defined as the area “free of human disturbance” – has been lost. Each year, it is estimated that around 18 million acres of forest is cleared, often illegally

In 1976, when he was a first-year student of photography at Ryerson Polytechnic Institute, in Toronto, Edward Burtynsky was given an assignment that would come to shape his working life. Instructed to go out and photograph “evidence of man”, he initially thought of ruins. What better evidence of man’s passing than something built a long time ago? But this was Canada, not Athens, and ancient ruins were hard to find. Burtynsky recalled that in his hometown, St. Catharines, there were remnants of the old shipping canals that had connected Lake Erie and Lake Ontario in the 1800s. He began shooting images of the sections he could find: abutments and walls that had once been part of an ambitious man-made system and now served, he thought, as an imprint – evidence of how human beings have irrevocably reshaped the land.

By and large, Burtynsky is still at work on that first-year assignment, only now he uses better cameras and criss-crosses the globe. His images are vast and uncanny landscapes of quarries, mines, solar plants, trash piles, deforestation and sprawl – pictures of depletion and desecration that are testament to the collective impact of humankind. Yet Burtynsky’s photos are not depressing. They are reverential and painterly, capturing gargantuan industrial processes in fine detail. He achieves such a quality by shooting in high resolution and by being an enthusiastic adopter of new technologies, such as drones and 3D imaging. He has started to think of himself not so much as a photographer but a “lens-based visual artist”. “Now when I’m in the field I’m working with still cameras, film cameras, and shooting VR and for AR,” he says. “There could be five different forms. I just apply what I believe is the best lens-based experience for the subject that I’m looking at.”

Today, Burtynsky is Canada’s best-known photographer, and his work has been acquired by 60 museums, including the MoMA and Tate Modern. Over the past decade or so, he has been immersed in The Anthropocene Project, a multimedia collaboration with the filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier, comprises photographs, a feature film, a book and simultaneous exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Ontario and National Gallery of Canada.

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Edward Burtynsky, Nicholas de Pencier, Jennifer Baichwal and a drone operator on location at Hambach Mine in Germany

Edward Burtynsky

Burtynsky first encountered the term “Anthropocene” when he was invited to contribute to a special issue of National Geographic in 2008. At the time, a small but growing band of scientists began to conclude that humanity had altered the planet to the extent that we had entered a new geologic time scale. They believe that the evidence points to an unsettling truth: that the Holocene – which began 11,500 years ago, at the end of the last ice age – is past and we are now in a new epoch, one shaped by anthropogenic forces. Burtynsky read their research. “In many respects it reflected the 30-plus years of work I’d been doing already,” he says. “The things that they were talking about – urban expansion, population growth, plastics, building dams – all of those things were things I was aware of and had been photographing. It just felt like a word had been put to the idea I’d been in pursuit of.”

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Burtynsky got in touch with members of the Anthropocene Working Group, the body of scientists tasked with putting forward a case for ratifying the Anthropocene epoch. At the core of their proposal was the need to find a physical marker for this new era, one that will be perceptible to geologists in hundreds of thousands of years’ time. (The marker that signals the end of Mesozoic, for instance, is the iridium that was dispersed around the planet after a meteor hit, killing most of the dinosaurs.)

Burtynsky’s work doubles as an artistic survey of the various marker candidates. For instance, to gather evidence of anthroturbation, or human tunnelling, he travelled to a 56km tunnel that burrows through the Swiss Alps and strapped a camera to the nose of a passing train. Other candidates include technofossils such as plastic, aluminium and concrete – all human-made objects that are largely resistant to decay. Terraforming – or the act of transforming the land for agriculture, industry or urbanisation – also features in Burtynsky’s photos in myriad form, from aerial photos of open-pit mines in New Mexico to the swathes of Borneo jungle cleared for palm oil plantations.

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For Burtynsky, defining the Anthropocene is a matter of urgency. Once formalised, he believes it will act as a body of evidence that policymakers can use to promote and enact changes that could slow or reverse climate change. He worries that we might be nearing the point of no return. “The question isn’t whether the planet will continue on,” he says. “We still have the Sun and a heated Earth core and some DNA that can restructure itself. Life on some level will continue on with or without us. But will there be conscious life if we are gone? We don’t know how much of it is out there in the universe, so to me it’s important that we at least try to preserve it.”

As engaged as he is in the natural world, Burtynsky is no technophobe. In his work, he uses specialised tripod heads, cameras with a resolution far beyond what the human eye can see, and drones that provide a whole new perspective on the globe.

The team took around 6,000 photographs of the second-tallest Douglas fir tree in Canada for an upcoming AR installation

Edward Burtynsky

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In 2016, Burtynsky flew to the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, in Kenya, with Baichwal and de Pencier. The trio were there to document the world’s last male northern white rhino, an animal named Sudan. “We thought that if we were going to talk about extinction, how do you get people to sit and how do you communicate that this is really happening, and that this isn’t in the future, this is now,” Burtynsky says. They spent six days photographing Sudan’s body from almost every possible angle (they discovered that the legs and underbelly of an old and indifferent rhino are not easy to catch), while a mic recorded his breath.

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In March, Sudan died, leaving his daughter and grand-daughter as the last representatives of a species that once roamed central Africa’s grasslands. This autumn, as part of Burtynsky’s gallery exhibition, viewers will be able to walk around a blinking and breathing three-dimensional scale image of Sudan, made up of hundreds of millions of data points, and “be in the presence of him”, as Burtynsky puts it.

Compared to two-dimensional photography, Burtynsky believes that AR inspires a different kind of engagement. “Part of my practise is also being very interested in the evolution of the medium,” he says. “In terms of AR, all of a sudden, I’m here at the beginning of a whole new form.” Looking at a traditional photograph in a museum, the viewer can walk up close and retreat, but the photographer largely controls the point of view. Standing in front of Sudan, the viewer has the power to alter the composition, the focus and the perspective. Their experience of the work is to a great extent in their own hands.

For Burtynsky, this relinquishment of control raises questions of authorship. “It’s a new form that’s emerging and I don’t know where it’s going to end up and how it’s going to change things. It brings a thousand questions to my mind,” he says. “But anybody who I’ve shown it to thinks it’s next to magic.”

Dandora Landfill #1, Nairobi, Kenya, 2016

Edward Burtynsky

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In 1950, less than two million tonnes of plastics were manufactured globally per year. By the early 21st century, it had risen to 300 million tonnes. The total cumulative volume of plastics up until 2015 was calculated to be five billion tonnes – enough to coat the planet in plastic wrap. Much of this plastic waste ends up in landfill or is dumped illegally at sea. “Good governance takes behavior that is negative or not helpful to the greater good of society, whether it’s polluting behaviour, plastics, or whatever, and taxes the behaviour… Governments can change things very rapidly and profoundly with base economics. In concept it’s easy to grasp; in execution, keeping a political base going and the electorate happy is not so easy.”

Oil Bunkering #8, Niger Delta, Nigeria, 2016

Edward Burtynsky

Oil is one of Burtynsky’s longstanding interests. His book Oil, published in 2009, explores the impact of the extraction of crude on the planet. In the Niger Delta, in some of the most desecrated landscapes Burtynsky has encountered, illegal distilleries refine crude diverted from pipelines and dump the waste back into the ground, a method known as bunkering. The Nigerian government estimates that between 200,000 and 250,000 barrels are stolen each day. To photograph the region, some of which is controlled by militia, Burtynsky hired a helicopter, mounting his camera on a specialised tripod that could stabilise the image by offsetting the aircraft’s vibrations.

Highway #8, Santa Ana Freeway, Los Angeles, California, USA, 2017

Edward Burtynsky

Cities are a part of terraforming – the act of transmogrifying the earth’s surface to meet human ends. “To me, Los Angeles was the invention of the suburb,” says Burtynsky. “They figured it out and perfected it and created a city that was dependent on the automobile. For that reason, LA was to me really interesting as a place to do a study on vast urbanisation. It still has one of the greatest footprints of urban sprawl.”

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Chino Mine #5, Silver City, New Mexico, USA, 2012

Edward Burtynsky

The Chino Mine in Santa Rita, New Mexico, is an open-pit copper mine stretching three kilometres across and has been excavated for more than 100 years. Once the copper is extracted, waste products stream out and oxidise in the air, forming tailings in rainbow hues. An excellent conductor of electricity, copper is used in everything from wires and motors to coins. “I’d say that my pictures are the result of a collective conscious,” says Burtynsky. “They are about our aggregate response to large-scale development, the things that we create, the things that we build, the things that we remove from the landscape. I’m not focusing on the individual, I’m focusing on the collective impact of humans in the pursuit of providing the kinds of necessary products to support food, clothing, housing and transportation.”

Makoko #2, Lagos, Nigeria, 2016

Edward Burtynsky

After growing at a gradual pace for most of human history, the earth’s population has more than doubled in the past 50 years. According to a 2017 United Nations report, the current world population of 7.6 billion is expected to reach 8.6 billion in 2030, 9.8 billion in 2050 and 11.2 billion in 2100. The world’s population is increasingly urban, with 54 per cent now living in cities, a proportion expected to increase to 66 per cent by 2050. Accommodating all the new city-dwellers is an issue. In Lagos, the world’s fastest-growing city, residents of the Makoko neighbourhood have built makeshift houses on stilts and live without plumbing, running water or electricity.

Building Ivory Tusk Mound, April 25, Nairobi, Kenya, 2016

Edward Burtynsky

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The destruction of seized ivory is a deterrence technique used by governments in countries where poaching is rife. In April 2016, the largest ivory burn in Africa’s history took place in Nairobi National Park, Kenya. The 11 pyres were comprised of 105 tonnes of elephant tusks and 1.35 tonnes of rhino horn estimated to be worth $100 million. Before the largest pile was burned, Burtynsky and collaborators took over 2,000 images, which they used to reconstruct a three-dimensional model. Between 2007 and 2014 the number of elephants in Africa dropped by 30 per cent; Today, there are around 352,000 elephants left in Africa. Burtynsky believes that our current high rate of extinction is one of the hallmarks of the Anthropocene. “I don’t think there’s any question that humans are at the core of these activities,” he says.

Tetrapods #1, Dongying, China, 2016

Edward Burtynsky

In the decade between 1995 and 2015, half of the planet’s total volume of concrete was produced. Human beings have now made enough concrete to coat the entire planet in a 2mm-thick layer. Geologists refer to concrete as a technofossil. Resistant to decay, fossilised traces of the material will be visible in many thousands of years’ time. Rapid urbanisation and population growth have fuelled the demand for concrete, not least in China, the world’s most-populated country. Burtynsky visited a tetrapod-production plant in the country’s north-east. There, these immense concrete masses are dropped into the sea where they form a barrier protecting the oilfields on shore. “They can take a severe beating against intense waves,” Burtynsky says. “With the rise of the oceans this is a way in which we as humans can build protective shorelines for our cities.”

Saw Mills #3, Log Booms, Lagos, Nigeria, 2016

Edward Burtynsky

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Burtynsky is sometimes drawn to abstraction as a means to make the viewer contemplate an image more deeply. These logs, floating on murky waters, are the product of saw mills in Lagos, Nigeria, but they could also be interpreted as, say, a flotilla of abandoned rafts. Burtynsky describes his body of work as “a compendium of visual images that describe the great acceleration that I see happening in my own lifetime”. The Great Acceleration is defined as the post-1950 period of rampant industrial development, coupled with the extraction of natural resources, population growth and globalisation that has brought unprecedented increases in pollution. Many of the scientists who are working to define the Anthropocene believe that an appropriate start date for the epoch is 1950.

South Bay Pumping Plant #1, Near Livermore, California, USA, 2009

Edward Burtynsky

The South Bay Pumping Plant pumps water along the 68km of pipelines and canals of California’s South Bay Aqueduct. The aqueduct begins at the Bethany Reservoir, where nine pumping units, with a combined capacity of 9.4 cubic metres per second, lifts water 170 metres into the first reach of the aqueduct. It is an important source of water in a drought-prone region; between December 2011 and March 2017, California experienced one of the worst droughts on record. “Having seen what I’ve seen, I can’t believe that we’re not moving towards a world of scarcity where resources are going to be harder to get and more pricey,” says Burtynsky. “I do think we live in a sustainable world. The question is can we overcome the entrenched interests who don’t want the world to change because they are doing very well the way it is right now?”

This article was first published in the November / December 2018 issue of WIRED magazine